Warcraft III Unit of the Day

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Unit #14: Will O' the Wisp

By IGN Staff

Okay, so I ran the poll and you guys voted -- the next side we'll be covering are the very cool Night Elves. Enjoy as we begin what will probably be at least a two week look into the inner workings of these mysterious woodland warriors.

Let's face it, everybody wishes they could be in something as cool as the Warcraft III beta test, right? But that's simply not possible.

So if you aren't one of the lucky few who managed to get in for a sneak peek at Blizzard's next real-time strategy game, how are you going to get a leg up on the competition? After all, the beta-testers are already playing the game and getting better at it every day. What chance do you have against them when the game finally comes out?

None at all. They will completely destroy you. You will become helpless cannon fodder for these wicked beta-testers, who will laugh and mock you for being a "noob" while their Battle.net ranking just climbs and climbs. The horror of it all!

Thank goodness for IGN Insider. To help combat this evil, we're offering up a brand new feature to our subscribers, the Warcraft III: Unit of the Day. Each day we'll examine one of the fifty or so units in the game, providing important statistics for each, giving a background on the characters, and showing you how the units work in the game, along with some great strategy tips. (And if you are a beta-tester, feel free to send us your favorite tips, too.)

If you pay careful attention to our Unit stories, taking good notes and then going back and practicing with Starcraft and Warcraft II, you'll be much better prepared for victory when the game comes out. And as an added bonus, we'll throw in new screen shots each day to keep you thirsting for more.

Note: Warcraft III is in beta testing, which means some abilities, stats and characteristics are subject to change. None of this information is official or final -- consider it a work in progress.

Welcome to the Night Elves

For those of you who are used to the Orcs and Humans of Warcraft, the Night Elves will be a welcome change of pace. The most immediate difference between the Night Elves and other armies you'll run into are that the Night Elf buildings can actually get up and walk around. They can also defend themselves a bit, and they can actually eat trees to regain their health!

Ancients on the move.

This doesn't apply to every Night Elf building, but more than half of their structures are called 'Ancients' -- vast, sentient tree people with faces, arms, and a tempestuous disposition. Being able to wake your buildings up and have them walk across the map to a more defensible position (such as inside another ally's base) is a neat advantage, and we'll see how it plays out in the weeks to come.

Still, don't think of your Walking Buildings as your mainstay in combat -- using these slow, relatively weak creatures only as a last resort. A town hall is still a town hall, whether or not it walks around or not, and if it's taking damage, you're definitely in trouble.

Overall, the Night Elves seem to be a mix of the traditional good, forest elves and the evil, subterranean kind of elves known as Drow. This is reflected in the voices and attitudes of the units, some of which are real tree-hugging, nature-worshipers who constantly talk about the Goddess and the Wilderness, while others, like the Chimera or the Demon Hunter, seem to have stronger ties to the Dark Side.

The Night Elves have some really cool music, too, that helps set the mood. It sounds like a bit of a cross between Celtic/World music and wandering into some sort of New Age bookshop. Plus, their unit voice cues are a mix of animal grunts and growls, plus a couple of sexy female voices and a couple of tormented Goth fellows.

After a while, it starts to sound like you're in some sort of insane person's idea of a Wiccan zoo.

The Will O'The Wisp (or more simply, Wisp) is the basic work unit for the Night Elves side. Unlike the Human or Orc peasants though, a Wisp can't attack and it doesn't talk -- it looks like a disembodied ball of glowing energy and it can be pretty hard to keep track of them on the map.

Night Elf Rogue's Gallery

The primary function of the Wisp is to gather resources and construct buildings. Constructing buildings is straightforward enough -- Wisps build all the structures you want in a Night Elf town, including the Ancients, those slow, ponderous Tree-Men who serve as the main structures.

Resource-gathering is slightly different for Night Elves, as well. In order for the Night Elves to make use of a gold mine, it first must be Entangled, which is a special ability of the Ancient Tree of Life (your Town Hall).

When a new game begins, you'll start with one mine already entangled and five Wisps ready to work. You'll also begin with one Tree of Life, where you can immediately start building more Wisps. Up to five Wisps can work in an Entangled gold mine, so you can put those first five Wisps to work right away -- although you're better off using one to create a Moon Pool (farm) and another to build the Ancient of War, which is essentially your Barracks.

Take the next few Wisps that emerge from the Tree of Life and set them to gathering lumber nearby. What's nice about wood-gathering for the Night Elves is the fact that their Wisps don't actually deplete the trees they're working on, they just sort of circle them in interesting patterns, automatically generating timber for you. This is helpful if you like keeping lots of trees around your base to help serve as barriers from the bad guys. It also means your Wisps don't have to travel as far returning in resources -- in fact, Wisps don't travel at all to return resources, the gold and lumber is magically added to your total merely by the presence of the Wisps at work.

When it comes to combat, however, Wisps are next to useless. The only possible benefit they have when attacking is if you have happened to research the "Detonate" ability for Wisps. If so, then you can order your Wisps to detonate around enemy troops -- but unlike the Goblin sappers, Wisp detonations are a spiritual effect, meaning they'll remove enemy spell bonuses and drain them of mana, but won't do any actual physical damage.